A DIFFUSED SPIRIT

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By E. K. Chambers. (Oxford.

THE mind of S. T. Coleridge has been by no means neglected by recent critics. We have had the psychological analyses of Mr. H. I'A. Fausset and Mr. Stephen Potter, and special literary studies by Mr. Livingstone Lowes and Dr. I. A.

Richards; not to mention other, more oblique, lights. But the two books at present under review are, I believe, the first " straight " biographies since the Narrative of James Dykes Campbell and the fragment left by Ernest Hartley Coleridge.

The biographer's task is not made easier by the fact that Coleridge virtually ceased to live some eighteen years before he actually died; and the preceding years are correspondingly

crammed with vital material. Mr. Chambers has attempted to compress his subject into one volume; Mr. Hanson—

more wisely, I think—has elected to spread himself, and his first volume takes us only to i800, the crucial year in which Coleridge left Stowey for good and went north to join the Wordsworths.

My own preference for Mr. Hanson's minute method of handling his subject is due to the conviction that Coleridge is one of those rare people to whom justice can only be done by taking account 'of all the facts, however seemingly trivial. The diffusion and complexity of his nature were such that the shape of his trajectory resembles nothing so much as those iridescent canals and whorls made by a film of oil spilt on water; one must follow each bend and examine each colour, if understanding, rather than irritation and contempt, is to be the final result. For this reason (among others) I think it unlikely that Mr. Hanson's biography will soon be superseded. For he gives us a complete portrait of the Rev. James Boyer, a detailed account of that incident which resulted in the boy Coleridge's sleeping out all night in a field. And he tells how the poet would walk down the Strand making swimming motions with his arms, because he was imagining himself Leander; how he induced Dr.

Crompton of Derby to " Rumfordize " the chimneys of his projected school. These are the things we must know and remember about Coleridge—these and the details of his fantastic plans and all he said about them—from Pantisocracy to becoming a Unitarian minister; by comparison, the exact extent of his pecuniary indebtedness to Messrs. This and That, or of his literary borrowings from that famous poem " The Other," are of secondary importance. It is the incredible diffusion of his spirit that matters, and that can only be rendered by a diffused narrative.

As Mr. Potter has pointed out (Mr. Hanson develops the idea without thus stating it), there were two Coleridges : one was that strange thing, a universal genius whose insatiable curiosity and synthesising activity drove him to interpret the world under all its guises; the other was a lamentably incomplete human being whose social behaviour comes straight out of an analyst's case-book. Mr. Potter—and perhaps Mr. Hanson—would deny this latter assertion; but I must insist that it is true, for only thus can the " enigma " of Coleridge be satisfactorily explained. Coleridge was not an enigma: he was merely an extremely complex personality. A few quotations from Mr. Hanson will serve this point : "To Coleridge at this time [1798] nothing was impossible, no obstacle too formidable to be overcome when he had set his mind upon the attainment of an object. It was when there was no obstacle, when his course lay plain before him . . . that he hesitated, faltered, drew back, and was lost. On all other occasions, he persisted in his purpose; differing only from many others similarly situated or determined, in the manner of overcoming the difficulty—for Coler- idge . . . prevailed upon his friends and companions to undertake the removal of the obstacle."

"But though he might resume, instinctively, the questionings of faith, his intelligence once exercised would not permit him to discard the reason with a like facility. It remained to dog him with a constant demand for proof of the validity of every emotion. This unceasing surveillance by the reason was responsible for Coleridge's passion to understand what he felt."

"Coleridge did not so much discard a thought as transform it, fit it into place in the jig-saw of his mind."

These efforts to make Reason and Emotion lie down together were clearly the result of a mind pulled forward by its ana- lytical power and backwards by childish desires that refused to develop out. For reliance on reason=self-reliance= adult- hood; and Coleridge remained a child till death. Thus his need and capacity for evoking pity were limitless; it is not too much to say that the farcical episode of Private Comberbacke was engineered by him to this end, since he took the pre- caution from the outset of making sure that his relations should find out where he was. The letters he wrote on these and similar occasions make unpleasant reading, because one feels their fundamental disingenuousness.

It is difficult to be fair to Coleridge, and he himself never really forgave those who saw through him (Southey, Words- worth, De Quincey). As father-substitutes they were tried and found wanting in that perpetually forbearing love he so pathetically craved. As for his wife, she was in hopeless case from the start. Mr. Hanson makes it clear that the marriage was the fault of Southey's obtuseness and revenge- ful dogmatism; it eventually foundered on the rock of Sarah's own inability to take her husband as he was.

One of the most original contributions in Mr. Hanson's admirable book at this stage seems to me his analysis of the Wordsworth-Coleridge-Poole triangle. His comparison of the two poets could not well be more acute, and I feel he is un- doubtedly right in asserting that for a long time (viz., until i800) Coleridge found in Poole a solidity as satisfying as Words- worth's; and that Poole's final disappointment with his friend was due to jealousy of a man whose character was sufficiently like his own to arouse in him no admiration, while that man's gifts as a poet seemed to him over-estimated by Coleridge.

The account of the poet's literary development is equally just : the whole of the seventh chapter, which describes how Coleridge and Wordsworth each emerged from his " Jacobin " phase, and the later account of Coleridge's great period of composition, are as good as possible—though when mention- ing that the Lyrical Ballads set out to exploit " the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes " Mr. Hanson fails to observe that they did not in fact employ that language at all.

Mr. Chambers' book is by comparison superficial. As a statement of the salient facts, it is painstaking, exact, and therefore of some use; but as a portrait of a most singular man, it is quite inadequate. The judgement is level and sensible, but the total impression is bleached : it lacks subtlety and sensitiveness, qualities indispensable to a writer on Coleridge. One feels that the author would have been more at home in a life of Southey.

Meanwhile, I shall look forward to Mr. Hanson's second